That was part of Rebecca Tuvel’s answer to a question from journalist Evan Goldstein about “the benefits of almost getting canceled.”

[Annie Vought, “Demeter” (detail)]

It was nine years ago, readers may recall, that the publication of Tuvel’s “In Defense of Transracialism” in the journal Hypatia ignited a firestorm of online outrage. You can read all about that episode here. (As Goldstein notes, the affair was recently mentioned in the “Vanderbilt Report” on the humanities.)

Dr. Tuvel says she learned of the controversy via an email she read while in a Target parking lot. She says:

I had a really intense reaction. I learned after the fact that I effectively went into a hypomanic state for about four days. I was obsessively reading every single thing on the internet. I was totally beside myself, wondering if I was a horrible person. I had always been a people pleaser. This experience forced me to become less so, which is for the better. As a philosopher, it’s damaging to be too sensitive to how other people receive your arguments. We should follow arguments where they lead.

A short while later, she says,

I had decided in my head that I was leaving academia. This was not what I signed up for. I was persona non grata in the feminist-philosophy world I knew. I recall wanting to get as far away as I possibly could, while also realizing that the internet follows you everywhere. Had academic philosophy as a field—including three brave feminist philosophers—not come to my defense, I would almost certainly have left academia.

Ultimately, she says, a few people ended up apologizing for signing an open letter at the time calling for the article’s retraction.

As for other lessons the experience held for her, she says:

One of the reasons the Hypatia affair was such a watershed moment is that it raised the question of whether feminist philosophers are primarily academic philosophers pursuing arguments wherever they lead or social-justice advocates whose scholarship is principally directed toward certain anti-oppressive conclusions… [I]t’s fair to say I wrote my article from an anti-oppressive lens. It’s just that the conclusion I reached was not regarded as anti-oppressive by my feminist critics…

I don’t bristle at the label “anti-oppressive.” (I’m not pro oppressive.) And I certainly care about justice. What’s changed is my view of how philosophy best contributes to it. I think philosophy serves justice best by pursuing the truth about justice. And the pursuit of truth about justice requires exposure to a wide range of views on contested moral and political topics. That insight has given me a much greater appreciation of the importance of intellectual diversity. When I look back now, it’s clear I was in an echo chamber. And a constitutive feature of being in an echo chamber is that you don’t know you’re in an echo chamber.

At one point, the conversation turns to individual integrity and social pressure. Tuvel says:

Even prominent people who have tenure and are very well established wrote me sheepishly: “Hey, I’m so sorry for what’s going on, and I’m also sorry that I’m not speaking out. But I just can’t handle it.” Most people are conflict-averse. They are not looking to make enemies. And online there was a great deal of social pressure to publicly support the case against me, and to sign the open letter as quickly as possible. This controversy would not have unfolded the way it did were it not for the dynamics and especially the speed of social media.

As I noted at the time, “the speed with which this has all happened is extraordinary.”

Goldstein suggests that some people participate in internet pile-ons without knowing the relevant details. Tuvel says she herself did that when she signed the “September Statement” aimed at pressuring Brian Leiter (Chicago) to step down from his position editing the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR), an influential ranking of philosophy graduate programs, and she subsequently sent him an apology, which seems appropriate. (Of course, there are several significant differences between the two cases—see here—and certainly it would be a leap to infer from Tuvel’s apology that many of the other signatories of the September Statement had “no idea” what they were signing.)

You can read the whole interview with Tuvel here.